Under the present system in the UK it really doesn't make much sense to work <=16 hour at around the lower wages. I know this from personal experience when I was unemployed (graduated uni at the worst possible time during the recession) and was offered a low paying job that was only 16 hours. I had to turn it down because it would mean I would have less money once I factored in travel costs because the benefits got withdrawn at a 1:1 ratio (in some cases it got withdrawn faster than my earned income grew), and I was barely getting by as it was. I was unemployed for another 3 months (6 in total) before I got near full-time hours offered to me. I was miserable for the entirety of my unemployment - there is nothing cushy about it.
This bug/feature in the welfare system is actually a major motivation behind the UK government's long beleaguered universal credit system, which is meant to support this kind of part-time work. The idea being that a worker should never ever be penalised by the benefits system for working, but should always earn significantly more in work than out of work and working more hours should always result in a net increase in income.
They are trying to do this by unifying almost all benefits (unemployment, disability, housing, child benefits, etc...) under a single administrative umbrella, and then only reduce the net benefit by £0.66 for each £1 earned through work. Its been delayed significantly because it requires a major IT overhaul, and that project has so far been a £1-2 billion black-hole of incompetence by a series of IT consultancies that have all failed to deliver the system needed to merge all these complicated means tested processes together.
This bug/feature in the welfare system is actually a major motivation behind the UK government's long beleaguered universal credit system, which is meant to support this kind of part-time work. The idea being that a worker should never ever be penalised by the benefits system for working, but should always earn significantly more in work than out of work and working more hours should always result in a net increase in income.
They are trying to do this by unifying almost all benefits (unemployment, disability, housing, child benefits, etc...) under a single administrative umbrella, and then only reduce the net benefit by £0.66 for each £1 earned through work. Its been delayed significantly because it requires a major IT overhaul, and that project has so far been a £1-2 billion black-hole of incompetence by a series of IT consultancies that have all failed to deliver the system needed to merge all these complicated means tested processes together.